Slack Deleted Our 10+ Year Workspace

What Happened

Over ten years ago we signed up for Slack. It became the central hub for our team communication, project coordination, and community building at MikesBlogDesign and our related projects like GFavIP.

Our workspace was categorized as a Hong Kong company account. On April 2nd — my birthday — the entire active Slack workspace was suddenly and completely deleted by Slack with almost no warning.

Not Just Us — A Wider Issue

This sudden deletion hit many others who had Hong Kong–based or Asia-based Slack workspaces. Here are the key references:

• Heather M. Huang (@heathermhuang) posted about her active Slack workspace being deleted and only later found one unopened email from November 18, 2025.
• Another user shared the exact deletion notice with the same minimal prior communication.
• Full Hacker News discussion explaining the background (Salesforce/Alibaba Cloud regional changes affecting Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and China accounts).

Many of us received only a single email months earlier that went unnoticed — no follow-up warnings, no second chance. The deletion simply happened overnight.

We Stayed Strong and Built Our Own Solution

Instead of scrambling for another third-party platform that could disappear the same way, we took control and built our own custom replacement: GFavIP WebChat.

This experience was the final push I needed to rebuild and significantly improve my own “Slack substitute” — giving us full ownership, better privacy, and a platform we can actually rely on long-term.

No more surprise deletions. Full control. Built for the long term.